Medication errors are increasingly recognized as an important cause of preventable deaths and injuries. A significant percentage of medication errors occur when a prescribed strength of a given drug is confused with a non-prescribed strength available for the same drug, and the non-prescribed strength is dispensed to the patient. Dosages can look like other dosages when handwritten or may be mistaken for another dosage when ordered orally. Interestingly, some of the more common errors have not varied over time, according to certain studies done on prescription errors. Such errors may be occurring due to pharmacists and/or healthcare providers being under a continuous and stressful workload. As an example, a pharmacist may accept a prescription for digoxin 0.125 mg, and fill it in error with digoxin 0.25 mg. Depending upon the drug prescribed, the consequences of selecting the wrong strength could be dangerous, or even fatal, especially when the prescribed drug has a narrow margin of therapeutic safety. Another potential consequence is a lack of efficacy, such as may occur when a lower dosage is filled than what was prescribed.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods that facilitate verifying prescription dosages. There is a further need for systems and methods that perform efficient and intelligent dosage verification processing by utilizing one or more of a variety of verification processing options.